Reflecting on the Reality of Racism

It will be 15 years ago this summer that I immigrated to the United States, along with a number of colleagues in my engineering group. One of my fellow “legal aliens” worked at the former Nassif Building over top of the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington, DC, a station he passed through twice a day on his regular commute. “You know what’s weird?” he casually mentioned one day. “Every evening the red line heading north fills up with whites, the green line heading south fills with blacks, and everyone getting off the trains is Hispanic. But that’s not what’s weird. What’s weird is that no one thinks there’s anything weird about it.”

With the tragic death of Trayvon Martin in Florida America is once again talking about “race.” Even though I’ve lived in the United States for over a decade and a half, I’m still trying to come to grips with how exclusivism manifests itself in my new homeland. I chose that word, “exclusivism,” and the phrase “manifests itself,” quite carefully. I would argue that America does not have a “race” problem, per se. What it has is a unique manifestation of the way we humans, since the Fall, have tried to build ourselves up by treading The Other underfoot.

I had the privilege of volunteering as a tutor for the Community Club at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, the church of Abraham Lincoln. One evening at a dinner I found myself discussing race issues with a fellow tutor. The more she described the history of black and white relations dating back to slavery, the more I could see analogies with the manifestation of exclusivism in my birth country, Canada – the divide between English and French. In Canada it is not skin color that divides, on a national scale. It is the language you speak.

I thought back to my years in high school, and how we mercilessly teased our janitorial staff who were, by and large, French-Canadian. My friends had nicknames for all of them, and fictional back stories for all of them. While I don’t remember being an instigator in the mocking, I don’t clearly remember ever opposing it. Despite my name. Despite, through my father and grand-parents, being a “Jean-Guy” and a “frog” just like the ones whom we were mocking. Later in graduate school I studied the troubled relationship between the English and the French in Montreal. I learned how many French speakers were told to “speak White” – English – in popular stores and restaurants. I learned that Montreal presented, up until the 1970s, an “English face” to the world despite being overwhelmingly francophone or French-speaking. English was the language of business, French the language of those who were only “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

The one thing most Americans seem to know about Canada is “that province that wanted to separate.” How silly, they usually say. Why would anyone want to do that? Because in our hearts, distorted by sin, we find ourselves naturally inclined to create a “them” that elevates “us.” We will do it based on skin color, language, country of origin, income level, gender, education, even a favorite sports team or university (“damn those Aggies”) – anything we can grab on to that will make us bigger and make The Other smaller.

Christians are not immune from this temptation. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). But the Spirit of Christ within us points out those inclinations and the lies on which they are based. We are all Adam’s children. We all share a common blood, a common ancestry. We are all cursed through him, and all are saved through Jesus Christ (Romans 3:22-25). In Christ there is no Greek or Jew, but one new person called “not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:26-28). Christians are called rather to die to self and rise for the sake of the Other, to show them the love God showed to us in Jesus’ life and death.

Years ago I sat at a dining room table in Calgary, Alberta, with a ballot in front of me. Would I vote to move Quebec, my fatherland, closer to independence or not? I thought of the comments of people in the streets about “the damn French.” I’d overhead people even suggesting an invasion to “fix them once and for all.” My hand hovered over the “yes” to independence. Then I thought of Jesus’ words – “it shall not be so among you.” I could not vote to destroy a country over anger and bitterness toward The Other. I voted “no.” French or English, black or white, native or immigrant; we are all sons and daughters of Adam. But in Christ, the New Adam, anger gives way to God’s sacrificial love.